Crossing Nebraska

Democracy in the U.S. is circling the drain. The Grand Old Party has become unabashedly fascist,  Congress has abdicated its constitutional power of oversight, and the Supreme Court has turned into a supreme enabler of authoritarianism. But it’s not just our elected and appointed officials who’ve lost track of what democracy is and what it requires. Many who voted in the last election seem to be living in an alternate reality, and those who sat it out seem strangely incapable of realizing what’s at stake until some executive order hits them on the head like a cudgel. At least at the present time, however, there appears to be enough pro-democracy voters out there (from both parties) who are politically engaged and of sound enough mind that a winning coalition might be assembled. Why then can’t the Democrats seem to get it together? Democratic Party logo surrounded by question marks A big part of the problem, as I see it, is that the Democratic Party has an image problem related to...

  Title notwithstanding, I’m not a fan of the expression “blood and treasure.” It strikes me as coarse and archaic and coldly calculating about matters of life and death. It evokes a barbaric age that should remain forever in our past. Sadly, though, it’s not. I first recall hearing “blood and treasure” spoken of within the context of the Iraq War and the quagmire that so many foresaw it would become. Once the adrenaline rush of the first bombardment and invasion wore off, we began to realize what a long slog the ground war was going to be. The loss of life and exorbitant monetary cost began to become apparent. It took years, but we eventually realized that that war wasn’t worth the blood and treasure it took to fight it, not that any are. In an earlier post, I recalled some of my earlier antiwar activism. I mentioned attending protests in St. Louis, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. in a failed collective attempt to try to stop the Iraq War. While some may have forgotten and some ot...

  We’re in a dangerous place here in the United States at present. Unconscionable pardons of convicted criminals and political firings of those who’ve assembled cases contrary to the interests of those now in power threaten to erode faith in our justice system. Government agencies have been gutted or dismantled to the point where reasonable concern exists whether any assistance or meaningful oversight will be available in times of disaster, famine, pandemic, or economic downturn. The balance of power between branches of government has become so lopsided that our form of democracy is now all but unrecognizable. More fundamentally, though, elections, science, and even truth itself have been called into question so frequently and forcefully as to leave us without an agreed upon objective reality from which to begin rational policy-making discussions.  It's enough to leave one apathetic and disengaged, or even clinically depressed for that matter. It’s enough to make one cynical...